One small thing about the Big Apple is the crime rate — New York is America’s safest big city by a mile, new FBI crime stats show.

New York has the lowest crime rate of the 25 largest cities in the country, Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday. And of the 261 cities with more than 100,000 residents, New York’s crime rate ranked 246th.

Violent crime plunged 4 percent in New York last year, outpacing the national crime decline of 2.5 percent.

The city’s overall violent-crime decrease in 2008 was led by a 9 percent drop in assaults — a plunge that offset spikes in other categories, including a 5.4 percent increase in murders, a 1.7 percent hike in rapes and a 1.8 percent boost in robberies.

In what’s surely more good news for Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, crime also dropped sharply in the first five months of 2009, according to NYPD data.